The Republican-majority House of Representatives passed a new anti-LGBT rights bill on Thursday, April 22, this time aimed at entrenching discrimination against transgender children in public schools and students at public colleges and universities. Republicans across the country, from the Federal government down to isolated school districts, have been waging a reactionary crusade against the rights of transgender people, especially children.
The Republican bill, should it become law, would bar transgender girls from participating in gender-divided sports in public schools, and bar transgender women from participating in gender-divided sports in public colleges and universities.
The Republicans passed their bill in the House with a narrow 219–203 majority; the vote split exactly on party lines, with all House Republicans voting for it, and all Democrats voting against. It will now be sent to the Democratic-majority Senate, where it will almost certainly be defeated, again along party lines. If the bill does pass in both houses of Congress, President Biden has promised in a recent “Statement of Administration Policy” document that he would veto it, which would kill it.
However, in the same document, and in other statements, the Biden administration has conceded that it considers some discrimination against transgender students in sports “fair.” Biden’s only problem with the Republican approach is that “one-size-fits-all” discrimination would be a step too far, and that a more “nuanced” regime of discrimination against transgender children would be preferable — such is the “left-wing” of U.S. fascism.
But discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg; what lies beneath the waves is the means by which the Republicans intend to enforce their discriminatory regime.
The Republican bill uses a scientifically outdated, oversimplified, and incoherent definition of “biological sex” as the basis of its anti-trans measures: It defines “females” and “males” according to “reproductive anatomy” as noted by a doctor at the moment of an individual’s birth, and recorded on that individual’s birth certificate. The bill stipulates that “inspection” of “reproductive anatomy” would be legally required to determine whether some children and some college students have the right to participate in sports in their respective public schools and universities.
In a statement, House Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a Democrat who aligns with her party’s “progressive” wing, and whose daughter is transgender, protested against the bill, and focused on this aspect in particular. “How do you verify a girl’s ‘reproductive anatomy’?” asked Jayapal, rhetorically, referring to language in the Republican bill, “If a young girl, if your daughter, doesn’t look ‘feminine’ enough, is she subject to examination? This is absolutely absurd.”
The answer to Rep. Jayapal’s second question is a horrifying affirmative.
The Republican bill would not only discriminate against transgender youth; it would accomplish this by instituting a regime of child sexual abuse in public schools. Transgender girls, as well as cisgender girls who do not appear sufficiently “female,” would be subject to inspections of their genitalia by school officials. In no uncertain terms, and with zero exaggeration, if this bill became law, children in public schools would be required by law to expose their private parts to adult public school staff, merely to participate in school sports and other phys. ed. activities.
At first glance, it may seem self-contradictory of the Republican Party, which presents itself as the party of “common sense” and “family values,” to have also made itself the party of institutional child sexual abuse — the party of pedophilia. But that’s the thing about fascism — it doesn’t have to make sense. Fascism outwardly embraces irrationality, for the sake of justifying its inward-facing logic: cruelty, and cruelty for its own sake. Critical scholars of (and against) fascism have long recognized that there is no coherent, integral “theory of fascism,” nor can there be. For instance, the British Communist leader Rajani Palme Dutt wrote:
The reality of Fascism is the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest the growing contradictions of its whole development. All the rest is decoration and stage-play, whether conscious or unconscious, to cover and make presentable or attractive this basic reactionary aim, which cannot be openly stated without defeating its purpose.
In other words, fascists will always hide their programs of reactionary violence — their state repression of the oppressed masses and our struggles for freedom — their real, fascist aims, behind palatable marketing: behind “family values” and similar slogans. Fascists will always lie, and have long-since proven themselves very skillful liars, from Mussolini and Hitler to “our” American Trumpites. That’s why what a fascist tells you he wants is irrelevant; what matters is what he really intends to do.
It is therefore no surprise that the Republican Party fascists present themselves as defending the rights of “biologically female” girls and women, even when, with the very next breath, they pass a bill to institute a regime of child sexual abuse against girls — cisgender and transgender alike — in public schools, and a regime of invasive “medical” inspections of women athletes’ bodies — again, cisgender and transgender alike — at public colleges and universities. The goal of this horrific legislation is not to “save women’s sports,” as some of the sex-criminal fascist Republicans claim, but to invade women’s bodies, and for that reason it presents a danger not only to transgender women, but also to our cisgender sisters.
Rajani Palme Dutt wrote that “Fascism has produced nothing, and can produce nothing. For Fascism is the expression only of disease and death.”
The fascism of the Republican Party is nothing but the agonized howling of the declining and decaying U.S. Empire, and the Republican pedophile fascists are nothing but the representatives of the extreme-right faction of this empire’s ailing monopoly-capitalist dictatorship. For as long as this settler-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist empire lingers and staggers on through the march of history, as long as it continues to prolong its inevitable demise, the fascist Republican Party will produce nothing but misery for and terror against the dispossessed, the poor and exploited, the marginalized and vulnerable, the wretched of the Earth.
American fascism will produce this misery because the Republicans and Democrats alike already know what growing numbers of the oppressed masses are every day coming to realize: Only the wretched of the Earth, conscious of the need to organize ourselves as a political force, willing to stand and fight, and no longer paralyzed reactionary terror, have the power to overthrow our oppressors. Only the wretched of the Earth can bring her, and ourselves, salvation.
